Transcript:

Hey, it’s John McIntyre here again. The Autoresponder Guy coming to you from themcmethod.com with another email marketing update. Today I want to talk about how wide your emails should be. This seems a bit random, so I’m going to use a bit of a quick story to explain the point, to make a point.

If you go to Gmail or your email client right now, like Outlook or one of those things, and you open an email from someone, sometimes, usually, it’s going to have a really long line. Really long lines. Let’s say you’ve got a widescreen. A lot of people have widescreens these days. You’ve got something that’s maybe a foot, maybe a foot and a half wide. 50 centimeters, half a meter, whatever.

When someone writes an email to you, could be a friend or a family member, could be a business, if they don’t know what they’re doing, and the email goes the full width of the screen, so when you open the email to read, you’ve got to read from one side of the screen to the other.

This is a pain in the arse, right? I don’t know if you’ve noticed before, but this is hard to read. When you try and read emails like this, you have to really concentrate to make it from one side to the other, and when you go back to the other side of the email, to go to the next line, you have to really concentrate and focus to get to the next line. It’s ridiculous.

As far as I know, studies have shown the really, really long lines, they’re actually harder to read, and makes people less likely to consume the content, whether it’s a sales letter or an email. This is why, when you see sales letters, the columns might be a 600 pixel width. It’s a very thin page. It’s not a full width page. Okay? To apply this to your emails, every email client’s going to have a HTML section. It’s really, really simple. All you do is you add a div tag. You might need to look up what a div tag is online, but basically you would add a div.

(See “mentioned” at www.themcmethod.com/use-this-code for instructions on the code):

Basically what this is going to do is it’s going to wrap your email in a 400 pixel div tag. I’m John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy. I’ll see you next time for another email marketing update.